I was talking with Mark Reid about some of the problems with Coding in a GUI. He nailed part of the problem with soundbite too good not to share:

"If you can't do it in a day, you can't do it."

This is a persistent problem with tools that make …

I came across You can't do data science in a GUI by Hadley Wickham a little while ago. He hits on a lot of the same problems I mentioned in Don't make me code in your text box. Take a look if you have some time. In the first 15m …

Whenever I start a new data project, my first step is rooting out any false assumptions I have about the data.

The key here is iterating quickly. My workflow looks like this: Code a little, plot the data, what do you see? Ah, outliers. Code a little, plot the data …

I finally got a chance to scratch an itch today.

Problem

When working with bigger ETL jobs, I frequently run into jobs that take hours to run. I usually either step away from the computer or work on something less important while the job runs. I don't have a good …

At Mozilla, we're still relatively early in our data science journey. As such, we're always evaluating new tools to improve our analysis workflow (jupyter vs. Rmd), or make our infrastructure more usable (our home-rolled ATMO vs. databricks), or scale our knowledge (knoledge-repo. vs. gitbook)

Most of these tools look like …

This is my first job making data tools that other people use. In the past, I've always been a data scientist - a consumer of these tools. I'm learning a lot.

Last quarter, I learned that bad tools are often hard to spot even when they're damaging productivity. I sum this …

Introduction

Working over SSH can be impossibly frustrating if you're not using the right tools. I promised my teammates a write-up how I work over ssh. Using these tools will make it significantly easier / more fun to work with a remote linux system …